indie recording influenced track

[kensuguro]

Was researching the indie rock movement in NYC.. bunch of hipsters in brooklyn writing music that sound like the 70's, but less drugs and way more facebook. There are a different types, like:
1. straight up high school band sounding, but the lead vocal looks 40. Still sings about how drunk girls are awesome.
2. scrapped together all the instruments we could find. It's that band you've seen with castanets, a tiny souvenir djembe, a clarinet, and a casiotone.
3. semi dance influenced. It's what you get when a DJ goes out with a girl that sings, and a room mate leaves behind his guitar. Voila, you've got a band.
4. experimental.. picks up on all the 70's avant garde cliches like extensive use of feedback echoes and crazy guitar techniques. From a modern perspective, it's actually more like "retro experimental"

A lot of it seems straight up revisiting low budget bands of the 70's and 80's. I did notice that on average, bands produce more songs that are quitely sung and arranged, rather than powerful vocals and exploding guitars. I kind of liked the quieter songs. The arrangement is almost 100% flawed, but it creates a unique sound.. actually hard to emulate.

The bass does tend to "ride up" into the high registers a lot. It's either up really high playing barely justifiable melodies, or it's down low doing 8 beat patterns.

All in all though, the whole indie rock thing seems a bit overrated. The vocals are very bad (I guess it can't be too good), and the entire band plays slightly out of sync. The recordings are usually very kitschy and lo-fi. I mean basically it's one step short from in your face "bad" band music. I guess that's the dilemma with kitschy things.. it's can't be "good" or "polished" since by definition it has to be crappy. I guess the whole movement resonates with the hipsters in brooklyn who live sort of a hippie lifestyle, and probably listen to lots of old rockbands that never made it mainstream. (because that's cool) And before long, they started producing imitations... and here we are. Someone dug up the stuff that history buried away.

Anyway, long story short, I did a quick tune to capture that chill out, sparse instrumentation feel. Having the harmony material be up high makes the whole thing sound very fragile. I also stayed away from making the chords sound too full. Seems the key word is fragility of the arrangement. It's a nice range of emotions. I kept away from degrading the sound though. I was thinking of using convolution for this and that, but decided it's overkill just to emulate a "bad" recording.

I spent some time with the long reverb sound. Many of these bands use that "wall of sound" echo chamber stuff, very wet sounding. I toned it down to just a "dark" cloud. It's a nice expansive sound, not bad. It's just a LCR delay going through a dark reverb.

The piano I played properly.. I think I over did it though, it's played too "nicely".. I tried to play "badly" but couldn't figure out what to purposefully do wrong, so just went with playing with proper musicianship. It's hard to play badly but not so bad as to compromise the song. I'd give the indie bands this much... they've picked a very finite space to doodle around in.

The drum machine.. the story is that the theoretical band (behind this tune) had a drummer, but he bailed last minute and moved back to LA since he couldn't stand the people in NYC. So the band had to use a rhythm box instead. The vocal's roommate who goes to film school tried sequencing drums in Garageband but it sounded to good and clean.

Also sounds a bit like the tune that Apple used.. forgot the title. The music box sound and octave pianos..

I used Sonimus Satson console emu for this. But because of the instruments I don't think it's doing much.

[dawman]

Cool Stuff Bro..